In the Land of Obey the Giant...............Democracy works. Power to the People!





Brainwax & words:
America's homeless population
Women's Voices Now
How Social Medias have made us less able to communicate
Death of Books: "Books to me are not disposable items - browsed today, forgotten tomorrow. They are doorways into other people's imaginations, repositories of knowledge and ideas, a means of blotting out and illuminating the good, the bad, and the hitherto unknown in life, the universe, and everything... Books are a departure from the digital world in which I otherwise live. I take out a book when all the screens in my house are dimmed... It's significant that Amazon claims its Kindle eBooks are now outselling hardbacks. I suspect they have a long way to go before they outsell paperbacks." Huw Collingbourne, "The Death of Books?"
------->> Love the medium as well as the message.
Living life vicariously through a screen
Being in a hut
Lazy
We want it fast and easy
Disease of Entitlement
"The Greatest Generation"
Faster, but also limiting
Nobody listens to each other
Protect your brain

Back to Shepard Fairey:
"The fantasy that has animated Mr. Fairey's career is that of the artist anonymously intervening in public life like a benign terrorist, unsettling collective complacency and inspiring new, critically perceptive thoughts about how the world works. His method has been to paste images and words that grab attention but then, unlike advertising and propaganda, deliver contradictory, ambiguous and vaguely menacing messages. This is supposed to have the effect of prompting epiphanies about possible alternative social realities." NY Times, March 12, 2009

The idea behind Fairey's work goes back to at least the 60s with artists such as Adrian Piper and Stephen Kaltenbach who inserted nonsensical ads in art magazines and other periodicals.
The Jenny Holzer with her lists of Truisms
Jean-Michel Basquiat's coinage "SAMO"
Barbara Kruger and the abortion-rights movement "Your Body Is a Battleground" and commercial enterprises such as Bloomingdale's "I Shop Therefore I Am" shopping bag

Fairey acknowledges his debt to Kruger.